A widely popular breakfast or Ready-to-Eat puffed cereal product is marketed that comprises a cereal base in the form of puffed rings fabricated from a cooked oat dough from oat flour. The puffed ring cereal base pieces additionally include a pre-sweetener sugar coating. The cooked cereal dough and/or sugar coating importantly includes a characterizing nut flavor provided by a honey roasted almond nut butter ingredient.
While adding desirable taste and nutrition appeal to such products, almond nut butter is an expensive ingredient typically costing up to 5-20 times the cost of the oat flour and other ingredients. When added at levels of 1% up to 10% of the breakfast cereal, the cost of this one minor (in terms of weight) ingredient can be in the range of the total cost for all the other cereal ingredients combined.
Moreover, these products contain a natural nut (almond) ingredient. While only a small percentage of consumers are allergic to nuts, especially peanuts, allergies to tree nuts, including almonds, (and peanuts) are among the most worrisome since allergic reactions to these allergens can be the most severe and potentially life threatening.
As a result, consumer food product manufactures must carefully and conspicuously label any food products containing such potential allergen containing food products to alert consumers sensitive to such materials. Also, responsible commercial manufacturers undertake rigorous (and thus expensive) precautions against inadvertent contamination of any other food products with such potential allergens. For example, commercial food processing equipment used to prepare products containing a nut ingredient must undergo intensive cleaning to insure removal of any possible potential nut based allergenic contaminant. Changeovers from producing such nut ingredient bearing products to non-nut ingredient bearing products are lengthy and challenging and result in substantial loss of production due to such hygiene considerations. Consequently, production of such nut ingredient bearing products is often practiced at separate or isolated production facilities often dedicated solely to such products. The necessity for such separation and isolation adds to the cost of production of such products well above and beyond the substantial cost of these high priced nut ingredients.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a nut flavored RTE cereal, or other consumer food product, that is substantially free of nut allergens, i.e., is non-allergenic.
Two traditional approaches have been taken to providing such non-allergenic nut flavor. In the first approach, a non-natural or artificial nut flavor can be used in substitution for the natural nut butter flavor ingredient. While useful, such artificial flavor ingredients usually contain only one or two principle flavor chemicals and thus lack the rich, complex, rounded flavor of a natural flavor ingredient. Also, present consumer interest trends favor the use or organic or at least “all-natural” food products (at least for some consumer product food brands). The use of such artificial flavors is inconsistent with the “all-natural” promise of such consumer brands.
In the second approach, an almond flavor derived from apricot pit extracts is used as a flavor that is thought by some to mimic the almond flavor from real almonds. Since the “almond” flavor does not actually originate from almonds, the potential for allergen contamination is absent. However, some consumers when reading the ingredient listing for food products find such substitution to be “dishonest” or misleading. Also, some more discriminating consumers are able, or believe themselves able, to distinguish the taste of such substitutes from real almond flavors.
In view of the current state of the art, there is a need for non-allergenic natural almond flavors that are derived from real almonds and to food products, especially breakfast cereal consumer food products, that are flavored with or by such non-allergenic natural almond flavors.
There is also a need for natural non-allergenic almond flavors of reduced cost relative to almond nut butters.
There is also a need for ingredients and methods of producing almond flavored cereal products not artificially flavored or flavored with ersatz almond flavorings that can be prepared on commercial production equipment that does not require expensive and extensive cleaning to reduce potential nut allergen contamination.
Surprisingly, the above needs can be satisfied and new and useful breakfast cereal products provided that are flavored by an natural yet non-allergenic almond flavor. The almond nut flavor is characterized by a protein level of less than 100 ppb (parts per billion)